Mama's Recipe — A Mobile App for Recipe Management and Sharing
The mobile recipe application is a cross-platform tool built with Flutter and Dart that allows users to seamlessly manage their personal culinary collection. Featuring a secure Firebase backend for authentication and data storage, the app enables users to curate and categorize recipes, attach menu photos, and export entries as PDFs, all through a streamlined, user-friendly interface.
Overview
Mama's Recipe is a mobile recipe management app built for CPE 3323 — Mobile Applications Development. The idea was simple: a personal cookbook on your phone where you can store, browse, and export recipes cleanly. It was a group project and my first experience building a mobile application.
Features & Functionality
The home screen presents your full recipe collection as browsable cards with a photo, ingredients preview, and cooking method snippet. Recipes can be filtered by All, Favorites, or Personal, and searched by name. Each recipe detail view shows the full ingredient list with tags, numbered step-by-step instructions, and a hero image. Adding a new recipe walks through a structured form, title, ingredients line by line, cooking method, tags, and an optional photo. A favorites system lets users heart recipes for quick access. The PDF export feature generates a clean, well-formatted document with the recipe title, tags, ingredients, and numbered instructions, complete with a "Generated by Mama Recipe App" footer.
Technical Implementation
Built with Flutter and Dart for a single cross-platform codebase targeting Android and iOS. Firebase handles user authentication and data persistence. The settings screen supports dark mode, push notifications, and account management. PDF export is handled natively, outputting properly paginated A4 documents directly from the app.
Reflection
This was my first time working in mobile development and thinking in Flutter's widget tree was a noticeable shift from web layouts. The app runs locally and was never publicly deployed, but the core experience — creating, browsing, favoriting, and exporting recipes, works end to end. Given more time, I'd push it to the Play Store and add cloud image storage so recipe photos persist properly across devices.
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